Tyler Clark Burke

Did You Know?

• Burke grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and attended high school in Kingston, Ontario, where her father was a Queen's University professor.
• She attended the University of Guelph but returned to Kingston after becoming ill with mononucleosis and chronic fatigue syndrome.
• She moved to Toronto at the age of 21.

Career

Tyler Clark Burke began her career as a freelance graphic designer and art director in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She shot the cover for Peaches' debut album, The Teaches of Peaches, and created album art for Canadian musicians like Jim Guthrie, Royal City, and Feist. In 1997, she worked as a graphic designer for Toronto's Eye Weekly, later becoming its art director and earning two cover design awards from the Advertising & Design Club of Canada. Her artwork has been shown alongside curator Katharine Mulherin. With Lisa Moran, she co-founded the independent label Three Gut Records in 1999, which released music by Royal City and The Constantines; she left the label in 2003. Between 2000 and 2008, she organized several art-dance-music parties, including Santa Cruz, which got frequent local press, even landing on the cover of The Toronto Star. In 2007, Raju Mudhar of the Star called Santa Cruz "the brainchild of local artist and provocateur Tyler Clark Burke," noting that attendees received numbers and mailboxes to exchange messages. In 2009, she and her husband Jeremy Stewart hosted miracle fruit tasting events in Toronto under the name Miracle Fruit Toronto. In 2024, she qualified for the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario. Her first children's book, Bill Bowerbird and the Unbearable Beak-Ache, was published by Owlkids in 2017; Kirkus praised its "rich with colors" illustrations but found the text "badly forced" and the plot "underdeveloped." Her second Owlkids book, Where Are You Now?, a picture book about death, change, and transformation, received positive reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, and Kirkus. Her book The Last Loose Tooth, acquired by Maria Mondugno at Random House, was scheduled for release in October 2020.